Watch: The Most Important Rap Documentary You'll See This Year

In the American mind, Chicago has become as inextricably linked with gun violence as Detroit is with urban decay. They're the places where self-destructive tendencies of our national character — gun obsession on one hand and blind faith in the free market on the other — have become magnified to an overwhelming, terrifying size.

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Recently Chicago made headlines when the CPD announced that in 2013 the city saw a 17 percent decline in homicides over the year before. The announcement, and most Chicagoans' reactions to it, were cautiously optimistic, and for good reason: 17 percent fewer killings compared to 2012 still means that there were 413 homicides in Chicago last year, nearly a hundred more than in New York City, which has almost three times the population.

If you look at a map of homicides in Chicago last year you'll notice they're clustered densely on the city's blighted South and West Sides. These are the predominantly black parts of the city that have been cut off from the ongoing gentrification boom by the figurative and literal barriers erected over a century of public and private policies of racial segregation. These are also the neighborhoods from which the rap style called "drill" emerged.

It's nearly impossible to separate drill music from the South and West Sides' epidemic of gang-related gun violence. In its earliest, rawest form the lyrics were graphically, almost giddily, violent, and the beats the mostly high school aged rappers, most of them with gang affiliations, were going in over were relentlessly dark and heavy, rife with funereal bells and rapid-fire drum machines that sound like they were modeled off of automatic weapons fire. The fact that the city was previously best known for producing socially conscious bohemian rappers like Common, Kanye (at least in his early days), and Lupe Fiasco made drill seem extra-nightmarish. It was scary stuff, and the fact that drill artists like Chief Keef and King Louie were finding audiences outside Chicago at the same time its homicide figures were making national news (and at the same time Keef was dealing with gun charges) made a lot of people suspect that its popularity was the result of listeners with the same kind of ghoulish voyeurism that powers the poverty tourism industry.

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A new documentary, The Field: Chicago, tries to explain the relationship between drill music and the atmosphere of endemic violence it was born in. Directed by Mandon Lovett and produced by the website WorldStarHipHop, it offers a deeply empathic look at life in these neighborhoods, told by the residents themselves, including a few of the latest wave of drill stars — among them Lil Durk, Katie Got Bandz, and Lil Bibby — who are trying to use the scene's growing national profile as a means of escape. They paint a picture of a place where street violence is an everyday occurrence, dealt out casually, and where years of neglect have made residents resigned to this situation. At one point in the film, Lovett presents viewers with a montage of shots in which one or more of the people being interviewed are caught looking up and down the block, constantly searching for the next threat. For those of us who don't live there, imagining this kind of perpetual need to be on watch can be chilling.